Every day, your two worlds collide. The predictability of the professional life and the unpredictability of infertility, injections, timing, basal body temperature, highs and lows, hope and hopelessness, the unpredictability of each cycle compared to 10 a.m. meetings, 2 p.m. phone calls, and confirmed output deadlines. Execution equals results. In one of those two worlds, you are always on and ready. You lead teams, run organizations, and manage projects. And in your other world, your heart breaks; you long for something you have waited for and desired for a long time, and no matter how perfect and meticulous you are, everything feels beyond your control, compared to your professional world, where you feel in control. And every day, you show up. In the same body, with two different worlds colliding.
You sit in this meeting, making huge decisions. While a few hours ago, you sat in an office, feeling helpless, waiting for someone to tell you what your next step would be. Your life with infertility. Your professional world.
You know what it is like to show up with your game face on while your heart is breaking. To feel like you will crumble at any minute, because you have teams to manage, meetings to run, and deadlines to meet, and none of that pauses during your hormone shots, retrieval, two-week wait.
Nothing about your fertility journey is certain. Timelines come and go. You take several steps forward, only to have to start again. Every new IVF cycle, every new piece of information, every restart moves you back to a new beginning, a new fear, a new hope. The clock keeps moving forward. Time keeps moving forward. And sometimes you find that you have moved several steps back.
There is a version of you that everyone sees. Present, clear, and delivering. And there is a version of you that is waiting for results, processing what comes up at each fertility appointment, and trying to make sense of something that has no certain answer and no predictable timeline.
Both of them showed up to work today. Both of them sat through your meeting. Both of them will close the laptop tonight and sit for a second in loneliness.
One in six people struggles with infertility, and most of them suffer through loss and grieve in silence. The silence around fertility treatment can make an already isolating experience feel completely invisible.
The person sitting across from you in your next meeting may know exactly what your morning looked like. She just has not said so either. When you feel ready, know that community is closer than the silence makes it feel. Your community might be a friend, a partner, a therapist, or a room full of women and birthing people who have lived every part of this story. You get to decide and choose who comes on this journey with you.
I am a fertility psychologist in California and Maryland and offer complimentary 15-minute initial consultations. If you are a woman, birthing person, or couple seeking infertility counseling, you may click here to schedule an appointment.